Barque and barquentine

We spotted a couple of sailing ships in Dorset

On our recent trip to the Dorset coast we were lucky enough to see several tall ships – and after a bit of research I think I can now tell the difference between a barque and a barquentine.

The first of the ships was a wonderful surprise as we looked out of our hotel window over Poole Harbour just after the Barfleur ferry had departed for the day. Hoving into view was this…

Did my eyes deceive me? Tall masts in the distance?

Definitely an old-fashioned sailing ship

It made very good speed, as of course it was being powered by its engine, not sails.

That’s Brownsea Island in the background

Zooming in on the stern

Zooming in on the bow

I could just make out the name of the vessel, even from that distance…

She is the Tenacious

Just approaching the commercial port

Of course I immediately Googled the Tenacious and found that it belongs to the Jubilee Sailing Trust and was built in the late 1990s with the help of a National Lottery grant paying 65% of the costs. It first sailed in the year 2000. Read more about it here and on Wikipedia here.

The trust is a charity with a mission to integrate people over the age of 16 of all physical abilities through sailing adventures on two tall ships – the Tenacious and the Lord Nelson.

We quickly got our act together and headed out to see if the Tenacious had moored.

Ship ahoy…

It became the main attraction for a couple of days

Just to confirm it’s the Tenacious out of Southampton

There was lots going on with ropes

More ropes – mooring ropes

I don’t know what they are called, but these orange things like space hoppers stop the ship being damaged against the quay – I think this may have been the skipper asking for one to be adjusted

A view from higher up on a nearby viewing platform

The anchor

The Tenacious figurehead

This ship is definitely a woman

I know this one – it’s called a bowsprit and is used to anchor the stays that hold the foremast straight as far forward in the ship as possible

That evening as we wandered back along the quay from restaurant to hotel, the Tenacious was romantically illuminated…

All lit up

A couple of days later the ship was crawling with people, no doubt preparing for a trip…

…and later that day she motored out to the open sea

The Tenacious is a barque.

This is the glorious sight of the Tenacious in full sail – picture from Wikipedia – click on the image to find out more about the source

In general terms there are three sorts of square-rigged three-masted tall ships. The three masts are the foremast, main mast and mizzen mast (the one nearest the stern). If all three masts have square sails it’s fully rigged. I can recall as a child memorising the names of all the sails on all the masts, just for fun. I particularly liked to shout “Hoist the t’gallants!” I must have heard this in a movie somewhere. It refers to the “topgallant” sails, just below the topmost sails. I can only think they were the ones you resorted to when you really wanted to get a bit more extra speed, but I could be wrong.

A fully-rigged three-masted ship could have a pattern of sails like this – picture from Wikipedia

If two masts have square rigging it’s a barque like the Tenacious.

This plan shows a barque with square sails on the fore-mast and main-mast

The mizzen-mast has fore-and-aft rigging, which looks more or less triangular and is easier to handle than the square-rigged sails. Even easier to handle is a barquentine.

The usual sail plan for a barquentine has square sails only on the fore-most mast – image from Wikipedia

We encountered a barquentine in Weymouth.

The Pelican of London moored in Weymouth

At first glance it’s quite similar to the Tenacious, especially the figurehead…

Prow of the Pelican of London

The figurehead

While the Tenacious was built from scratch as a sail training vessel, the Pelican of London was built in France in 1948 as an Arctic trawler and then worked as a coastal trading vessel. In the late 1990s she was sold and stripped back, to be transformed over 12 years into a barquentine.

She is now used by the Weymouth-based charity Adventure Under Sail for sail training for career and personal development.

Stern of the Pelican of London

Annoyingly the naming of ship types is not as clear-cut as I first hoped. Although the Pelican of London is a barquentine it is a rarity, possibly unique, as it’s the main mast that is square-rigged instead of its foremost mast. Wikipedia doesn’t even have a sail-plan diagram of such a design.

It has been likened to a xebec or polacca (polacre) used in the Mediterranean, often by pirates, in the 18th century and 19th century. Many sail-plans were used in a bid to get more speed and use fewer crew.

The Pelican of London in full sail

I did say we saw “several” tall ships. The others were a lot smaller – the John Laing belonging to the Ocean Youth Trust South and an old favourite the Queen Galadriel, a former Baltic trader now run by the Cirdan Sailing Trust. I blogged about the Queen Galadriel in Poole in 2010 here.